An Indecent Proposition, or Poly Book Report Number 1

You know that one book about polyamory?  No, not Opening Up.  That's more about general non-monogamy.  The Ethical Slut?  Same deal.  No this one is a work of fiction, except when it spends page after page turning into Ayn Rand-style lectures about the nature of mankind of of human relationships.  No, not Stranger in a Strange Land, though it is an old book.

No, I mean Proposition 31, by Robert Rimmer, the guy who made a fortune off his book, The Harrad Experiment.  Don't know that one either?  The latter's known today as little more than a “Seinfeld” punchline, but in the late 1960s and throughout the 70s, Robert Rimmer's many books were the go-to tomes on free love, polyamory, and sexual experimentation.  For that, he's worth a read by anyone who likes to delve into the often under-appreciated history of sex-positivity and non-monogamy.

While an interesting book from an historical perspective, Proposition 31 is slightly less interesting as a piece of fiction.  It's clear that Rimmer didn't intend it to be a work of fiction, so much as a vision of how the future would look.  He repeatedly has characters wonder aloud how different the world will look in 50 years.  Given that it was published 46 years ago, it's unlikely that his vision of wealthy white people incorporating in order to live in group marriages and realize tax benefits will become a reality by the half century mark.

The plot of the book is far from complicated.  Two well-educated families move next door to each other in sunny Southern California in the late 1960s.  In short order, one of the husbands gets the other's wife pregnant in the course of an affair.  Then through a series of contrived scenarios, they all end up in a in a group household raising their children collectively and saving on taxes.

Yes, tax breaks are one of the selling points to “corporate marriage”.  It's also explained that corporations are constantly merging, harnessing efficiency gains and achieving synergies, but divorces and parental deaths are shrinking families all the time, so why not have us all get naked prepare an SEC filing in the dark?  Yes, families can embrace mergers and acquisitions, grow, and become massive group sex corporations.  Robert Rimmer did indeed have an MBA from Harvard, which is clear by the way this book reads like the exact way Mitt Romney proposed to Ann.

The story is fairly simple for the first 210 out of 280 pages, but Rimmer uses a few bizarre narrative elements that make it tough going well before he drives the plot off a cliff.

The whole thing is presented as an historical narrative written by the colleague/affair partner of one of the protagonists, a sociology professor at a fictional SoCal university.  This means that it changes perspective a few times, with different people telling the same story, without overlap, like some sort of free love World War Z.  One has to keep stopping to remember if this is Nancy's story, or Horace, or Horace's affair partner Sylvia telling the story.  While it would have been nice to have overlap in the narratives of each person as a way to see the same events through different perspectives, that only happens once, and the story is so ludicrous that ones struggles to believe the “true” telling of the story.  Unreliable narrator nothing, this is an unreliable author.

For more than two thirds of the book, it's wall-to-wall sex and speechifying about the flaws in modern marriage.  In several scenes we're forced to put up with someone giving a sociology lecture replete with  substantial block quotes.  In that sense, the book really feels like a cast off from Ayn Rand.  There's a message here, and we have to get through it.  The preceding fluff was all just the author giving us a literary handjob to work up enthusiasm.

Where the book detours to crazytown is at page 211, when it's suddenly announced that they were all hauled off to jail by a stodgy authority figures who couldn't just let them love.  Yet again, The Man is sticking it to wealthy white people; thanks Obama!

The characters fight back in the only way really rich white people can do in California: they rioted in the streets.  Just kidding.  They employ the resources of other, even richer white people to put an initiative on the ballot to allow plural marriage.  This book is the fictional history of how that major legal change occurred.  For fun, look up Prop 13, a real proposition from the same era.

That's it.  Rich white people make poly a legal reality because they have money and influence and want to save money on taxes.  It's not exactly Inherit the Wind.  But is it so bad?  In a nutshell, no.  While I wouldn't recommend the book to a casual reader, it's a fascinating little artifact from the white moneyed portion of the 1960s counter-culture movement.  While we tend to think of that era being about young people burning draft notices and bras, there was life beyond youth culture.

Though not recommending it for the masses, I can't help but push it into the hands of all the poly people I encounter.  This is their history, even if it's a fake history.  The early days of poly are poorly documented and with the recent passing of Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart, the origins of the movement are rapidly fading.  And while most young poly folks might not care, they should.  If it's something they believe in, then it's worth knowing where it all came from.  Their predecessors were bandying these ideas around years before their parents first had that twinkle in their eye and Schlitz in their hand.

Again, it's not a particularly good book by any measure.  But it's cheap, silly, and mostly harmless.  At 280 pages, one can make it through the book in the quieter moments of a weekend.  Instead of one more read through a Harry Potter book, this is a not terrible alternative.  It's at least worth it as a means to achieve escape velocity from much of the individual-focused world of modern Internet polyamory.